Throw Down Your Arms

Rocket Science; 2005

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Okay, let's be up front: Your appreciation of this album will be directly tied to how seriously you can take the idea of Sinead O'Connor singing reggae. No one debates that O'Connor can sing. Nellie Hooper's barely-there backing of "Nothing Compares 2 U" throws her quivering, gorgeous voice right up in your ear. Also, no one should doubt her love of this music; don't forget that when she pulled the crazy pope-ripping stunt on Saturday Night Live it was to the tune of Bob Marley's "War". And reggae, the most non-secularized pop music on the planet, often chapter-and-verse on record, is an apt vehicle for a woman who left music in order to become an ordained priest in a non-traditional Catholic denomination.

And Throw Down Your Arms is certainly authentic. It was recorded at the Marley's Tuff Gong studios in Kingston, and produced by Sly & Robbie, one of the five or 10 most smoking rhythms sections ever, in or out of reggae. And here's the thing you're probably most worried about: no, she doesn't sing it in cod-patois. Her voice is the same as always, that ringing, lilting Irish clarity. So thank God (or Jah) for small favors and good taste. Anyway, it's hard to fuck up a song like Peter Tosh's "Downpressor Man", and O'Connor doesn't. The band gets deep in the pocket, bass and drums on equal footing with voice as with actual reggae, and O'Connor sticks mostly to fire and brimstone roots like Burning Spear's "Door Peep" and the hectoring anthropomorphism of Lee Perry's "Vampire". She stretches out on Perry's charming "Curly Locks", made famous by Junior Byles, a sweet tale of a dreadlocks in love with a girl whose father will let her having nothing to do with him.

At the end of the day, though, I'm a bit puzzled over why the world needed an album of Sinead O'Connor reggae covers. If anything she's too reverential and deferential. Nothing here betters the originals, and nothing takes them out into new, unexplored terrain. There's no way O'Connor can match the dread of Burning Spear's original "Marcus Garvey", to say nothing of the fact that music here never stretches its legs out to the wobbly dub versioning of "Garvey's Ghost". (Seriously, if you don't own the Marcus Garvey album, run to the record store yesterday.) The world of reggae is so vast, with so many great records to explore, that unless you're a huge Sinead O'Connor fan, this isn't much more than an enjoyable curio.